Celebrant

Celebrant

The latest novel from Michael Cisco (The Narrator, 2010, The Great Lover, 2011), Celebrant is the story of deKlend’s search for the mystical city of Votu, where time runs backwards, deified robots arise naturally in the mountains like mysterious rock formations, and gangs of vagrant orphan girls scavenge for survival whilst engaging in strange rivalries and alliances.

With a Miyazaki-like sweep of fantasy, and the Calvinoesque imaginative appeal of a guidebook to another world, this initiatory novel of reincarnation, pilgrimage, and discovery, experiments with other ways of locating yourself.

About The Author

Michael Cisco is the author of The Divinity Student (Buzzcity Press; International Horror Writers Guild Award for best first novel of 1999), The San Veneficio Canon (Prime Books, 2004), The Tyrant (Prime Books, 2004), a contributor to The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases (eds. Jeff VanderMeer and Mark Roberts) and Album Zutique (ed. Jeff VanderMeer), and his work has appeared in Leviathan III and Leviathan IV (ed. Forrest Aguirre). His novel, The Traitor, is published by Prime (2007). Secret Hours, a collection of his Lovecraftian short stories, is published by Mythos Books (2007). In 2009-2010, his stories have appeared in the Phantom (“Mr. Wosslynne”), Black Wings (“Violence, Child of Trust”), Lovecraft Unbound (“Machines of Concrete Light and Dark), Cinnabar’s Gnosis: A Tribute to Gustav Meyrink (“Modern Cities Exist Only to be Destroyed”), and Last Drink Bird Head anthologies. Forthcoming works include a story in The Master in the Cafe Morphine: A Tribute to Mikhail Bulgakov (“The Cadaver Is You”), an appearance in The Weird (Atlantic/Corvus), an omnibus edition of published work from Centipede Press, The Wretch of the Sun, from Ex Occidente Press, and The Narrator, from Civil Coping Mechanisms. His columns and the occasional review can be found at TheModernWord.com. He lives and teaches in New York City.

“The Great Lover by Michael Cisco [is] the best weird novel of 2011 – by far. At this point, it appears Cisco is simply operating in a sphere that most weird fiction writers never reach, or attain only rarely, and is doing it effortlessly. That he remains so unknown is an absolute travesty. ”

“The surreal narrative [of The Great Lover] is something like a 400-page T.S. Eliot poem: otherworldly, lyrical, deeply philosophical, and supersaturated with extraordinary imagery and ideas (like the Prosthetic Libido, a golem-like device constructed to house a scientist’s unwanted desire). Fans of stylish and thematically sophisticated weird fiction should seek out this mad testament to Cisco’s visionary genius. ”

Publishers Weekly

“It seemed as if The Tyrant was the biggest monster Cisco could make, but The Great Lover is now his new masterpiece. Brilliant, light-years beyond … still marauding. He should receive plaudits for conceiving the Prosthetic Libido alone. Cisco has an identity as much as any writer I’ve read.”

Thomas Ligotti

“The subterranean mindscape of The Great Lover is a cosmos entirely unto itself, a mysterious, reeking, unutterably strange, hazardous, fecund and carnivalesque digestion of events, ideas, opportunities, revelations and mutations. Cisco’s imagination is the most monumentally Tartarean of any dark fantasy writer currently writing. ”

Rhys Hughes

Praise for Celebrant:

“With Michael Cisco doing things like this, sometimes it feels like the rest of literature might as well get up and head home.”

China Miéville

“…this fusion of surrealist travelogue and journey of self-discovery is an impressive work of weird fiction, and its images and ideas will resonate with readers long after the novel ends.”